As Australia turns its attention to Vivid Sydney, brands have a rare opportunity to connect with audiences immersed in culture, creativity and night-time exploration. What began as a local light festival has evolved into one of the country’s most anticipated cultural moments. In 2025 alone, Vivid attracted more than 2.5 million visitors. Foot traffic across Sydney’s CBD also rises significantly during the festival, with weekend visitor numbers increasing 22% compared to the typical weekend average.
For several weeks each year, Sydney becomes a city-wide canvas of light installations, performances and experiences. Crowds gather after dark, moving between waterfront precincts, dining destinations and live events.
For marketers, this creates something increasingly rare in today’s fragmented media landscape: large, engaged audiences gathering in the real world. Programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) allows brands to meet those audiences where attention naturally exists, turning the festival into a powerful brand moment.
Vivid Sydney creates a rare concentration of attention across the city. But to fully capitalise on the moment, brands need more than just presence.
Programmatic DOOH enables marketers to activate effectively, reaching audiences as they move through the city and adapting messaging to match the environment.
Here are four ways brands can maximise impact during Vivid.
One of the key advantages of programmatic DOOH is the ability to activate campaigns in specific real-world locations.
Through geotargeting, brands can select screens in precise areas across a city, ensuring campaigns appear in environments where people are most likely to engage with the message, rather than relying on broad city-wide placements.
During Vivid, this becomes particularly powerful. The festival draws large crowds to waterfront precincts such as Circular Quay, The Rocks, Barangaroo and Darling Harbour, creating high-attention environments for brands to appear alongside the festival experience.
By activating screens in particular locations, brands can capture consumers as they travel between installations, explore the city at night and gather in popular viewing locations.
The real power of programmatic DOOH lies in its ability to combine the scale of out-of-home (OOH) with the precision of data-driven targeting. Programmatic DOOH allows marketers to also plan campaigns around audiences. Instead of buying a screen alone, brands can define the types of people they want to reach and activate media where those audiences are most likely to appear.
For Vivid, this approach allows brands to focus on highly relevant audiences such as cultural explorers, interstate travellers, premium diners and event attendees as they move between transport hubs, hotels, entertainment precincts and waterfront destinations.
When location-based placements are paired with audience insights, programmatic DOOH allows brands to reach the right people, in the right environments, at the moments that matter most.
Vivid is a constantly evolving environment, and programmatic DOOH allows creative to evolve alongside it. With dynamic creative, brands can automatically adapt messaging based on real-world signals such as time of day, weather, location or live data feeds. Instead of running a single static message, campaigns can serve multiple creative variations that respond to what audiences are experiencing in that moment.
For example, messaging can shift as crowds build throughout the evening, highlight nearby dining or retail experiences when audiences are exploring the city, or introduce countdown creative as peak festival nights approach.
Because dynamic creative operates from a single template, these variations can be deployed programmatically without requiring hundreds of separate assets or manual campaign changes.
The result is advertising that feels less like an interruption and more like a natural part of the environment.
Programmatic DOOH doesn’t stop at the screen. With device ID passback, brands can reconnect with audiences exposed to DOOH campaigns across mobile, display, social and connected TV, creating a seamless omnichannel journey that reinforces messaging beyond the street.
This allows brands to turn real-world attention into continued engagement across digital channels, extending the life and impact of the campaign.
From the build-up to the brightest nights of the festival, programmatic DOOH enables brands to connect with audiences in the real world and extend that impact across the broader media ecosystem.
With Vistar Media’s DSP, marketers can activate campaigns across premium screens in airports, transit hubs, retail environments and key urban precincts, reaching audiences throughout their Vivid journey.
When the city lights up, attention follows. And programmatic DOOH ensures your brand shines alongside it.